In 1879, on the road leading into Dodge City, there stood a sign. "The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited," it said.

As recounted in the book "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America" by Adam Winkler, the gun control ordinance was the first law passed when the city was organized in 1873. Nor was Dodge unique. Many ...Read more

And well he should be. The Texas governor was in Odessa, in the western part of his state, to preside over a mass shooting there: seven dead, not counting the shooter, and 22 wounded, one of them a toddler. This follows a May 2015 shootout in Waco (nine dead); an ...Read more

His gaffes, his mistreatment of Anita Hill and even his kissy-face behavior with segregationists notwithstanding, I think he's a decent guy. If he is the Democratic nominee, next year, I'll vote for him -- twice, if I ...Read more

So says Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Part 2." Though often regarded as a Renaissance-era lawyer joke, the line is actually a backhanded compliment to the legal profession. Dick, a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, knows that before their insurrection can succeed, they have to ...Read more

In popular culture and historical memory, of course, evil has many faces. It is Darth Vader raising a lightsaber and Dr. Doom glowering from behind a metal mask. It is Charles Manson grinning his lunatic's grin and Adolf Hitler ranting himself into a frothing rage.

The term was popularized by sociologist Robin DiAngelo in her 2018 book of the same name that seeks to explain why white people often find it so hard to discuss race, why the subject frequently makes them angry and defensive. Well, a textbook example of that fragility recently roiled social media.

He was murdered by Hillary and/or Bill Clinton. Or he was assassinated by the Russians. Or Donald Trump killed him. Or he isn't dead at all, having been spirited into the Witness Protection Program, where he presumably now shares an island mansion with Tupac Shakur and 84-year-old Elvis Presley.

If that's an exaggeration, it's not as much of one as you may think. While there had -- obviously -- been teenagers before, it wasn't until the leading edge of the Baby Boom reached that milestone that the word took on its modern meaning. In the heady prosperity of those first years post-war and post-...Read more

Nine people shot dead in Dayton, 13 hours after 22 shot dead in El Paso, six days after three shot dead in Gilroy. And tears and disbelief and funeral preparations, candlelight vigils and a search for meaning, and talking heads on cable news and T-shirts and hashtags touting resilience in the face of pain: "Dayton Strong,...Read more

"I'm simply tired, tired and tired of hearing about race," he wrote last month in an email. He signed himself a "former racist" and in a postscript, wanted me to know that he used to have "a black friend" with whom he ate breakfast on workdays.

Take Ed as an example of the pushback that comes when you grapple with America's ...Read more

If you are a regular here, you may have heard this story before. But it bears repeating.

In 1958, George Wallace ran for governor of Alabama against John Patterson, a fire-breathing segregationist. Wallace, though also a segregationist, was considered enough of a racial moderate to be endorsed by the politics/fromtheleft/leonardpittsjr/s-2255840">Read more

The first responders who, on a September morning 18 years ago, rushed into toxic clouds that once had been the World Trade Center never should have been put through bureaucratic hell. Sick and dying because they answered...Read more

That was the status South Africa used to bestow upon black performers from the United States who visited the apartheid regime. The O'Jays, Tina Turner, Ray Charles and Eartha Kitt were among those who received that designation, allowing them access to hotels and restaurants from which black Africans were ...Read more

It is, they say, "an organization that -- based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities -- has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for ...Read more

Years ago, I got to visit Kwethluk, an Alaskan town of fewer than 900 souls. It is an isolated place where the people, most of them Yup'ik and Eskimo, live on what the tundra provides: ptarmigan, moose, seal, salmonberries. I remember standing upon that snowbound landscape and marveling that I was further than I'd ever been ...Read more

A man named Josef Buzhminski told this story at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

It happened on July 27, 1942, at the fence of the Jewish ghetto in Przemysl, Poland. Buzhminski was watching from hiding as an SS man named Kidash seized a Jewish woman and her 18-month-old son. "She held the baby in her arms," Buzhminski said, "and ...Read more